John Sutherland
Coarser Connections
E M Forster: A New Life
By Wendy Moffat
Bloomsbury 416pp £25 order from our bookshop
Concerning E M Forster
By Frank Kermode
Weidenfeld & Nicolson 180pp £14.99 order from our bookshop
Jane Austen went to the grave a virgin, leaving six full-length novels behind her. Would those novels have been better had Miss Austen had as lively a sex life as, say, slutty Lydia Bennet?
E M Forster was a virgin until the age of thirty-nine, when he had his first ‘full’ sexual experience (a ‘hurried sucking off’, Wendy Moffat informs us) with a passing soldier on a beach in Alexandria.
By that point, five of Forster’s six novels were written and the last, A Passage to India, drafted. Until he was thirty, with much of his oeuvre behind him, he did not, he later confessed, ‘know exactly how male and female joined’. ‘Muddle and mystery’ between the sheets
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
For two decades the Polish Nobel laureate Wisława Szymborska wrote an anonymous column for a literary journal, inviting writers to send in their writing for her to critique.
Joanna Kavenna peruses her feedback.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/have-you-considered-accountancy
Mazower turns 'the Greek Revolution from a simplistic, two-dimensional story into a vast colourful fresco populated by a cast of characters that is astonishing in its diversity.'
Stathis N Kalyvas on a new book about the Greek Revolution of 1821.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/freedom-or-death
'The subtitle of this biography, "Never a Dull Moment", refers to the momentous events of George V’s reign, but the book’s real surprise is that its author, having laboured through the king’s deadly diaries, does not find him dull.'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/colonel-blimp-enthroned